One of the days in the last week of March in 2018 in Bangalore, I found myself attending a workshop on stone balancing. Strange as it sounds, it had been organised for teachers who had just finished the term. It was part of a retreat before we all went home for the summer break. I remember enjoying it, while also making fun of how useless it seemed. Balancing rocks on top of each other. The practitioner taught us to find the tripod points on a stone by studying its texture and then balancing it on another stone.
Over the years, I found ways to amuse myself and others with this skill. Along streams and rivers, I would make temporary sculptures of balanced stones. When people asked where I had learnt it, I would tell them it came from a workshop back when I was a teacher.
I worked as a teacher for close to a decade and loved being one, until it began to feel like the systems were not built to serve children. A teacher had to constantly fight the structure if they wanted to be of real value in a child’s life. That fight wore me down gradually. The school largely catered to affluent children and I taught environment and life sciences there. I would often tell my students that they should only go to college if they genuinely wanted to learn something. They should not waste time collecting degrees that merely helped them accumulate more wealth they already had in excess. Only a handful ever considered what I said. Ozair was one of them.
Ozair came from a wealthy family in the North. When he was my student, his interest in the environment and natural history came more from curiosity and adventure than academics. We often went on long walks into the wilderness, swam in the lake, and spoke about life, music, and art. We used each other’s company to make sense of existence. He finished school in 2015 and we stayed in touch. Over the years I watched him learn scuba diving and work as a dive instructor in the Andamans. Later he studied jazz in Chennai and then in Brazil. He was always drawn to things that felt like adventure. Once in a while we would have long conversations. He told me about night dives near Havelock, whale sharks, strange visitors to the islands, loneliness in Brazil, and the exhilarating jazz community there.
I ended my association with the school in 2020 and had begun working as an independent singer songwriter. Another former student invited me to write for his Kannada feature film. What began as writing turned into many roles. I became associate director, dubbing supervisor, dialogue writer, and music director. It was a hands-on education in filmmaking. I learnt a lot. But after the project there was a sharp dip in work. I had to return to teaching at a small school in Bangalore. It was not what I wanted, but it was the only skill that could get me work, unlike stone balancing. I loved being with children, but disliked being part of an institution. After one academic cycle, I realised it was serving me only by paying my bills.
Around this time Ozair called. He had been living in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in central India and was now a wildlife photographer and filmmaker. He had made a few films on natural history and wanted me to write the voiceover script for one on the biodiversity of Uttar Pradesh. It was the first time we had worked together since I had helped him with his Class 12 Environmental Science project, which he had no interest in doing. The film has still not seen the light of day, but it gave us a taste of working together.
A few months later, Ozair received a grant for one of his ambitious projects. It was a film on wildlife conservation through the perspective of an indigenous forest guide. He wanted me on board as a writer. The following winter I was in Bandhavgarh, roaming dense forests with him, understanding the social and political dynamics of the place, making notes, and having long discussions about our film. I could not stop being in awe of where I was and how the origins of this moment lay almost a decade earlier when we roamed the hundred acre school campus watching birds and wildlife and speaking about life and relationships. This felt similar, only freer without institutional discipline.
During that trip and the next, we completed the first draft. Writing a documentary is very different from writing fiction. In fiction, we write scenes and bring them to life. In documentaries like ours, we write in anticipation of what may happen and then weave a narrative through reality. It required deep understanding. We had enough material to schedule a shoot and were looking for a Director of Photography. Since both of us wanted a non male voice on the project, we approached Rusha Bose. She graciously accepted, seeming to believe in the spirit of the film.
Every time I was in Bandhavgarh, Ozair shared stories about Ram Garib. He was caretaker of a privately owned plot there. Much of Bandhavgarh contains land bought long ago when it was inexpensive. Over time these private lands became extensions of forest where wildlife moved freely. Ram Garib belonged to the Baiga community, known for a deep intuitive understanding of the forest. Ozair often placed camera traps on his land to study wildlife movement. Whenever a tiger passed through, Ram Garib would inform him. One memorable story was how he picked up a twig and spoke to tigers through them as if they were mobile phones. He could accurately predict which camera held which animal, even if it had been captured deep in the jungle late at night.
One morning during the shoot, Rusha, Ozair, and I were sitting outside the guest house while Ozair narrated another Ram Garib story. When he finished, we sensed someone behind us. We turned. A slim dark man stood there with a towel wrapped around his head. His eyes carried strong indifference. Ozair was briefly startled. It was Ram Garib. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere.
He told us a tiger had killed a cow on his plot the previous night. We decided to set up a camera near the kill with Rusha’s guidance to capture footage for the film. Five of us, Rusha, Ram Garib, Ozair, Aman, and I, drove there in a jeep. Aman was Ozair’s line producer and handled much of his work in Bandhavgarh.
As the jeep approached, a fact struck me. It could only go as far as Ram Garib’s cottage. The rest had to be done on foot, with a tiger possibly nearby eating a cow. The first time I had seen a tiger in Bandhavgarh was from the safety of an open jeep. It had come so close that I shivered, much to Ozair’s irritation because he was filming and said my shaking was spoiling the shot.
Back at the plot, Ram Garib first showed us a deep claw mark in the soil where the tiger had leapt toward the grazing cow. Then he described the scene like a forensic expert, telling us where the cow fell and the direction it had been dragged simply by reading the soil and bent grass.
We followed the drag marks into a dense narrow path. Ram Garib led. I was behind him. Ozair, Rusha, and Aman followed in single file. With each step I wondered what would happen if I met the tiger at the next turn. At one point Ram Garib said, “Sir, do not worry. I am here. I will not let the tiger do anything to you. If it comes in front of us or charges, do not run and do not show your back.”
I thought, excellent advice, but I had little faith in how I might behave if I saw a tiger on foot with nothing between us except a lanky Ram Garib. Fear was alive in every cell of my body. No one else seemed to share it. Their faces were calm and curious, focused on setting up the shot.
Then Ram Garib suddenly stopped. I froze. He pointed to a murder of crows sitting on a tree ten meters away. If the crows were waiting on the branches, he said, the tiger was below eating its meal. Ten meters from us, a tiger was feeding while we stood fully vulnerable to its mood. I felt absolutely naked.
I asked the others if we were doing the right thing by being there. They smiled. Ozair admitted he got equally scared but somehow liked the feeling. Rusha and Aman looked unaffected. Maybe on the inside they were afraid too, but not consumed by it. I felt utterly alone in what I was experiencing.
My head filled with quick flashes of memory. My years as a teacher. My journey with Ozair and other students. My family. My partner Swati, who had supported me in all my pursuits. I imagined how my death by tiger might burden her with guilt. Strangely, such thoughts did not bite as sharply there as they would have in the comfort of home.
On my first trip I had sat in a tree house with Ozair discussing our film in awe of the moment. Here I was with the same person, now terrified by another moment. Yet this terror had a different quality. I felt vividly alive. I felt like an extension of the forest, not an exception to it. I was as bound to its rules as the tiger, the grass, the butterflies, and the crows.
Ram Garib clapped and made a few sounds. Minutes later the crows descended. He said the tiger had moved away. We approached the kill. The top half of the cow lay there with almost no meat left, buzzing with flies. The other half, he said, had likely been dragged elsewhere when the tiger heard us.
While I stood there asking myself what justified my presence, and at the same time feeling strangely like a part of the universe, the others remained focused on setting up the camera. The box needed some height from the ground to capture a good shot, so everyone, including Ram Garib, began searching the forest floor for rocks. I was too frightened to move about freely and could only pretend to look, without finding anything.
Nearly a dozen rocks were gathered. As they began building a pile to rest the camera box on, Ram Garib suddenly asked us to be silent. Everyone froze. He pointed toward a bush barely six feet away. From behind it came a sharp cracking sound. He said it was the tiger eating the other half of the cow, its jaws snapping through hard bones. The tiger was present to us not by sight, but through the sound of its bite. In many ways that felt more frightening than seeing it. A visual at least reveals mood and distance. Sound leaves everything to imagination.
The others too seemed shaken by this interruption, but they knew the camera had to be set quickly before we tested the tiger’s patience. They returned to their task with urgency. Each time they placed the camera box on the pile of rocks, the structure collapsed. They tried again and again, and each failure tightened the air around us. We now had proof that the tiger was right there, and might not be pleased with us lingering over its hard earned meal.
Then I realised I was the best person there to mount the camera box. I was the only one who had attended a workshop on stone balancing. In a moment that seemed determined to prove the usefulness of that forgotten skill, I asked everyone to move aside and began arranging the rocks. It shifted my focus away from the hidden tiger. To my surprise, I balanced the structure on the first attempt in a very elegant form and we immediately walked back to the safety of the jeep.
I am still processing the lessons inside that episode. Some things are clear. To feel absolutely vulnerable in nature can transform you in ways you do not expect. I know it transformed me, though I cannot yet fully articulate how. Stone balancing is a valuable skill. Any skill is valuable in a context. If we think education is about teaching children the exact skills needed for life, we may be setting ourselves an impossible task, because we never know where life will lead us or when. Having lived this, I feel we need to look again at our approach, our expectations, and the design of education.

The first pile of balanced stones was a joke.
The last one was a prayer.
Everything in between the school, the songs, the films, the fear, the tiger cracking bones six feet away was just the universe learning to stack itself.

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